Weekly Skews - Weekly Skews 8/31/21 – Pandemonium at the School Board

Episode Date: September 1, 2021

This week we discuss the latest cultural battleground in America: the local school board meeting. It is significantly more insane than it sounds. Also all the latest Horse Pills News, and a conversation on wealth inequality with rural activist John Russell. Join us.Support the show

Hidy, everybody. Happy Skews Day to you. Today is August 31st, 2021. I'm Trey Crowder. That's Mark Aegee. What's up, Mark? was up, Trey, how are you doing today, but I've been obsessed with this Bishop Sycamore high school story all day, yesterday too. Have you been following it? So there was a big high school game on ESPN where one team got blown out by the other team and it's supposed to be a showcase for a bunch of future college football stars, but turns out one of the teams was completely fake and made up, and it was filled with 20-year-old like juco dropouts who were pretending to be high school students so they could get on ESPN and then they got blown out or something like that?

Yeah, so they basically used the charter school system to set up a fake school. They had an online-only classes and also a football team. So they were, they basically just had a fake paper school with a real football team full of guys who were old enough to be wrecking cars and shit. So, but the funny part to me, I was trying to who were they playing?

The other team they were playing was IGN Academy, I think, which was a school owned by Waima Morrison, endeavor, which is a big Hollywood agency. And so essentially, their school is also fake. What they did was they started a football prep school. I think they do basketball too, where a bunch of scholarship kids who were they were trying to get into the pros that will then sign WME's sports subsidiary, right, as agents.

And the other kids that go there pay $80,000 a year from their rich parents to be able to say they play them this big time high school football team. What? So it's like that what's your name that that went to prison for the? the getting your kids to college the faking it thing uh what's your fucking name you know i'm i'm becky i'm becky yeah yeah yeah uh william h macy's wife i can't but flee what's your name yeah yeah yeah anyway yeah so it's like that whole deal like rich people pay a shit lot of money to send their kids to this basically made up school where superstar athletes play so that they can like play with them and get extra shine or whatever yeah their college resume was so they

played on a big-time high school program to play on ESPN and want to stay title or whatever. But so, but like what Becky was doing was trying to backdoor thing that was already a backdoor because what rich people will do is try to get their kids, coaches and tutors to be really, really good at like extraneous sports. No one else plays like fencing. People are, it's Lori Loughlin. Thank you. Lori Loughlin.

Yeah, yeah, that's a real name. But I'm trying to think, I can't think we mention Macy's way for whatever reason. I apologize. Felicity Huffman. Ler Lilley Luffman, Felicity Huffman. Thank you to our comment for setting us straight on that. But I think it's important to understand that they were trying to hack that's already a hack. They're trying to get by on the cheap.

I pretended to do something the other rich people were already doing. Right. Which is you make your kid the best fencer in the country and then they get into Gale, right? Even though they have like B grades, you know? So like this is sort of like a different end of that where you get to say you play play play play on the state. It's like Al Bunny scored four touchdowns this single day. They'd be like, I was there the day so-and-so, future Hall of Fame running back scored four touchdowns. I was on that team.

You usually hire me for your white shoe law firm. Buddy. What is real? America anymore. You know what I mean? Like, ain't that America? There's two made up high school teams playing each other on ESPN for all these fucking superficial reasons. Holy shit. Okay. Well, with us as always his producer, Matt, I want to remind you of a couple things real quick. I'm touring

again if you are vaccinated. Go to well-read comedy.com for tickets and information. We'll be in Riley, North Carolina, September 10th through the 12th and a lot of other places after that. Also, if you need a little more tray in your life and, hey, who doesn't go to patreon.com slash tray crowder i do a lot of fun stuff over there i rate and review american politicians this week actual human man senator ted cruz so if you're into that holler at me on patreon as for the show tonight we're going to discuss the latest battleground and the ongoing cultural war in this country the local school board meeting where they want someone please think of the children crowd are doing everything in their power to ensure that every american child has an

opportunity to contract COVID-19. Also, all the latest news from the world of horse pills, because that's the reality we live in, and a conversation with rural activists and fellow Appalachian, John Russell, whose recent videos explaining the true extent of wealth inequality in this country, have taken the internet by storm. Looking forward to that and everything else on tonight's skews, but first, as always... Before we start the show, Trey, I wanted to say, you told Ted Cruz an actual human man, and I need to have a source on that. Yeah, because I would, if you saw him swallowing eggs whole, would you be shocked? No, not at all.

It's funny. I'm actually like, because it gives me a chance to talk more about my Patreon video, the whole general gist of it is that he is not an actual human man. He sees some sort of nether being wearing a human skin suit. Yeah. So we're on the same page. But, all right, let's get into the show and let's begin, as always, with the Daily Dumbass. Matt, graphic, please.

Tonight's D.D., the Taliban for trying to steal Chet Hanks' thunder. What the hell am I talking about? Well, we'll let this brief clip from Fox News explain itself. Matt, go ahead. So it's hot boy summer in Afghanistan and the Taliban is having the time of their life. and dumb, man. It's so dumb. Everything is so dumb.

I used to get mad at people for, I love the movie idiocracy, but I used to get annoyed when people would call it a documentary, because I would always be like, dude, do you know how stupid people used to, yes, we're stupid, but do you know how stupid people used to be? But honestly, as we go further forward in time, it's harder and harder for me to feel that because everything is just dumber and dumber every day. Why did they say this, Mark? Why is it Hot Boy Summer over there? Well, today our last plane left, right?

So the Taliban was, like, dancing the streets and setting off fireworks and shit. I don't know what he's talking about specifically. So somebody on the Internet is going to take these clips of them dancing in the streets and they're dancing in front of, like, like, commandeared U.S. helicopters and military equipment and stuff like that. And somebody's going to put Hot Boy Summer over the top of it and make a montage with Chad Hanks rapping over it or whatever. Get on it to the Internet. That's what we need in 2021. the helicopter here's what I'm talking about like so this kind of it's kind of refreshing how

unstupid most people are about this because like you look at the polling everyone's like yeah it's a good idea we got off the war but the fucking the people in charge are going insane with this stupid shit like Ted Cruz retweeted a fake video he actually he admitted it was fake by still staying in the gist of it but there was a fake video that was viral that they said was that Taliban had executed someone by hanging there from a helicopter one of the helicopters we left behind. Now, people have been making a big deal about these helicopters. People say, oh, it's a bigger helicopter fleet than China has. How many helicopter pilots do you think this haliband has at their disposal? How much helicopter fuel? How many helicopter

mechanics? These helicopters are fucking paperweights to them. If we, like, there was a big video of like 550 tanks that were left there. They were like Soviet-era tanks that were already been stripped for parts. And the, if the Taliban could gas up the tanks, they could figuring how to drive. Remember, all these guys have ever driven is Toyota pickups. Right. And they can fuel them up and get them started and drive them. They go, what, do figure eights in the desert? It's not like they're going to be like, okay, boys, just got to cross the Peshwar mountains will be in New Jersey by dawn. It doesn't fucking work like that. All these complaints are just so stupid. I'm glad most people aren't falling for them. But it's like, what do you,

what do you think is going to happen, man? Taliban doesn't have an aircraft carrier. They can't get here. It's fine. Right. But listen, Mark, in all seriousness, it's terrible what's happening. over there, which leads me into our first honorable mention for dumbass. Lindsay Graham, who literally could not find the word to express how terrible it is. May I play the clip, please? It's a catamlyistic, just a fair beyond my ability to describe it. It's been a... Yeah, it is.

The word you're looking for is cataclysmic there, Lindsay. Yeah. Listen, honestly, man, far be it from me. You know, I've fucked up so many ways. words on this show and otherwise, but still, Lindsey Graham's a fucking idiot. Yeah, I just couldn't remember Felicity Huffman for five minutes. But, but, uh, well, we're not on, we're not U.S. senators with pre,

that was scripted for him. Some take aid wrote that talking points. We'll look up the word cataclysmic and it's like, this is a good word. I'm going to nail this word. And fuck it up. That's what makes extra funny to be. We do no, we do very little research for this. So, uh, that's on him.

Yes, indeed it is. Uh, all right. So let's do the next one, Mark. And because it involves a conspiracy maniac, I would like for you to present this one, please. All right. So there's a guy, he's three, John David Steele, I think. His last name is definitely Steele.

He's a former CIA, works for the CIA, apparently. I don't know what capacity, but he turned, used it at that credential to get a job at Info Wars, where he shot at a bunch of conspiracy theories, including one that, like, for example, that, he said that NASA was operating a child sex slave operational Mars. That was one of his greatest hits, all right? His last quote, literal last Facebook post said his blood oxygen level was at 77.

That's about 15 too low. But it was a lie that he had COVID and he still wouldn't get the vaccine. You'll never get what, guess what happened next? He did. Yeah. But his fellow Infowars host want you to know that whatever, It looked like it was COVID. It was not as it seems.

Yeah. Open your eyes. Don't take my word for it. Do the research as I have done. He was doing well until they put him on Rennesivir. So Aaron says this is the trend. How is he doing right now? This immediately resulted in his oxygen levels dropping, and they immediately began shaming the family to force him onto a ventilator.

And Aaron comments, this is all Florida is offering. Of course, they're trying to make Florida look bad. Why? Why? Because DeSantis is not going along with the agenda. so they're trying to they are targeting Florida yeah so they don't actually work to make Florida look bad right because that's what you everybody yes it takes a lot of work to make Florida look uh fucking crazy and fucked up I was a I was thinking back um one time I was a little

kid uh we used to tease my mom about this because what the town Burger King went out of business right and my mom was like one day it was open the next day it was closed it's like well yeah i mean that's how going out of business works is one day you're closed and but it's like it's like he was alive and then the next day he was dead it's like hmm makes you think no that's how i could if you refuse to go on ventilator and you need a ventilator you're going to die right do you know what i'm like that's that's that's that's causing that's the basic order of operations here uh it's like the old expression of bankruptcies, they happen slowly than all at once. That's how organ failure works, too.

So it's just like, there have been a lot of these cases recently. I mean, you'll be forgiven. I think there was a conspiracy because like three different right wing AM radio hosts have died in like the last week and a half. And if there's a conspiracy, it's whoever got promoted from noon shift to drive time because of all those deaths, because people are moving up slots. No, but it's also, it's like you said, like those deaths are only noteworthy because they spent all day proclaiming that the virus was bullshit or the vaccine was bullshit or whatever.

And, you know, when the virus is real and the vaccine works, it's not that surprising that people that are very vocally opposed to those two stances, get sick from the virus and die from it. You know what I mean? Yeah. Like, it all completely tracks. There's no conspiracy to be laid out here. Everything is operating really as it should be. Yeah. A lot of these hits lately.

Most phone with lately is like a guy who, a lawyer who represented Kyle Rittenhouse and now currently, you know the guy who shot up, shot two protesters in Kenosha, three protesters in Kenosha. He's now representing 17 January 6 defendants. And the U.S. attorney can't get him on the phone. And apparently it's because he's on a ventilator with COVID. So all these 17 guys who might be up for to get out of jail on bail or plead guilty and get out with time served or whatever. It can't because their idiot lawyer is an anti-vaxxer. And his literal last post, on August 17th, he tweeted the entire 82nd Airborne couldn't make me get an experimental government vaccine stuck in the harm. Well, you're right about that, buddy.

87 Airborne wasn't going to make you, and now you're on a fucking ventilator. So, I mean, this isn't like some poor guy who are making fun of because he didn't have resources or money. Like, he, like, Kyle Rittenhouse's mom says like $4 million has gone missing from the go fund me instead of for his defense. I'm sure this guy got some of it. He got a ticket a day off work to go fucking get jab. So, yeah. No, fuck him. All right.

Let's go through these last time. We'll mentions quickly here. Next up, anybody who had tickets to Kid Rock's upcoming tour for, well, so many reasons. But specifically, because it is now canceled. That's right. You put up the screen grabs there. Matt, Kid Rock's upcoming shows have been canceled, even though he reinvigorated his passion for.

performing at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally. You can see them there in front of all his fans. He wrote this very impassioned message that ends with. There is nothing the mainstream media or the internet and social media trolls can do. But look at this pick and weep, knowing they will never beat us, fuck them, love to you all, signed Kid Rock, his rival us. Five minutes later, put an extra screen grab up there, Matt. oh billy bob shows this weekend kid rock says i'm pissed over half the band has fucking covid parentheses not me and before you ship for and before you ship for brains bloggers and

media trolls run your mouths many of them like me have been vaccinated i was going to come and rock the house anyway play acoustic dj whatever but he can't do that so here you go dude Listen, honestly, I kind of feel bad for the COVID cells that are currently fighting for the lives inside the bodies of Kid Rock's band. Do you know what I mean? Like, it's got to be, it's got to be tough sledding in there. COVID's in there just like, God damn, what is that smell? They're all backed into a corner fighting off all the hepatitis cells and shit. Like, what is they fucking, they broke into the wrong goddamn wreck room.

Yeah. Hepatitis, hydrocodone, fucking methadone. All the diabetes is. Yeah. Yeah. Weaponized men do. All those weird diseases, we used to put jars in a deer queen to help cure people of. Yeah. It's got all those.

All right. Okay. Our final honorable mention for Daily Dumbass is, uh, whoever gets pumped. It just, it just hits. It just has nothing to be said about it. It's just, yeah. Anyone who gets super pumped up genuinely by Marjorie Taylor Green's walkout, uh, music and spiel. Just play the fucking clip. Look what she comes out to.

Dude, no one involved with this entire thing could be happy. First of all, this is an Abraham Lincoln dinner. Imagine Abraham Lincoln being subjected to any of that. But also ACDC, like, can you imagine a less rock and roll setting than what they had going on there? It's fucking chandeliers, the fucking final boss of character. Aaron walks out in the white dress with sparklers going off and shit in the background. It's like, that shit ain't rock and roll. This kid.

Abraham Lincoln himself would be like, this is the worst show I've ever seen. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We got some shit to cover before we get John out here in a little bit. But I wanted to say, I'm glad somebody picked up on it. Comment from An Enemy An Enemy says, nice tremors callback, Tray. It was actually a reference, but you're right, I was referencing tremors.

I'm glad you picked up on it. When I said that COVID broke into the wrong goddamn wreck room when they infected Kid Rock's band members, that is a tremors reference. So good on you for catching it. How about that? Anyway, okay, so let's do an update quick on what's going on in the world of horse pills. They're on fire, Mark.

Ivermectin burning up the streets out here. Prescriptions for the horse deworm, the livestock deworming drug, not proven at all to be a COVID cure, have surged 24 times higher than pre-pandemic. You can't keep it on the shells, Mark. You can't keep it anywhere. The important distinction here is those are prescriptions for the human version.

Those are up 24, but doesn't count the fucking people who get it off label. So, but in Florida, this is poison control calls are up 300% for hypermectin. Over last month, when people already taking hypermectin for this shit. People are going nuts for it. Did you say in Florida? In Florida? It's up? Yeah.

That doesn't make sense. See, this is more private. Apaganda. People trying to make Florida sound crazy, okay? Dude, Mississippi is up like a thousand percent with this shit, but they must be relieved in Mississippi to get calls over, poison control calls over this instead of, you know, what to do when you mix butt light lime with ox and cotton for dogs. Yeah, yeah. They're all half cow in Mississippi anyway. Yeah, I'm going to roast all of SEC country. That's what I'm here for. But also, lunatic judge in Ohio or the hospital to give a patient of ivermectin over his doctor's or risk of a, because a family was insisting on it. But so the fun aspect of this to me that is happening this week is the lot feed store owners are starting to push back because they're starting to feel guilty over all the money they're raking in and killing their own repeat customers. So this feed store owner in Vegas is trying desperately to get people and people come to her store to stop from taking it.

I'll show two clips and slip a news story. But yeah, this is what's like on the ground for these people. This is really great. a gentleman come in it was an older gentleman he told me that his wife was wanted him to be on the ivermectin plan and i immediately brought him over here because at that time i had this sign hung up and i told him this isn't safe for you to take and he says well we've been taking it and my only side effect is i can't see in the morning that's a big side effect so i mean you that I've been taking this drug.

And the only thing that's happened is I'm blind for a while, okay? So get out of here with your bullshit. Not dead of COVID, though. It works. Sure, I'm still coughing, still got a favor, and I'm also blind for a little while. But I'm still kicking, and I haven't subjected to the liberal magnet hoax.

So I guess that guy still insisted on getting iburemectin. And so she's kept feeling bad because her sign, She had a sign hanging up and said, I remember that's not for people. It calls it death in humans, yada, yada, yada. So she took an added step and I'll let her explain to you her new strategy. We have that second clip, Matt.

It's continued to increase in recent weeks with Smith receiving four or five customer calls a day, which is why she hung this second sign, now requiring customers to present a picture of their horse before buying. Oh, we require horse proof. You must have proof of horse in order to purchase these drugs, everybody. Dude, how many people are walking in that store?

They've read it at a horse costume and made their wife get in it so they could do a picture by the horse. Just went and found somebody's horse and took a selfie with it or whatever. They were probably going to do that anyway. Oh, my God, dude. It defies explanation. It's one of those things we talked about before. It's like so many things that happened with these people. It feels like some simulation.

It's so on the nose. Do you know what I mean? Like the bullshit for these purposes drug that took them by storm could have just as easily been like something for like a foot rash or something. You know what I mean? And then it would be like, what are y'all doing? But it just had to be fucking horse pills. You know, it just had to be. be livestock-related, all barn-yard-y in fashion. It's just unreal. What they do is they take

a kernel of true. So there are countries that are where doctors are using small doses of iburemectom in a cocktail with a bunch of other drugs, right? So a little bit of hydrochloroquine, a bunch of vitamin salute. They don't, but the reason they're doing all these like duct tape treatments is because they don't have vaccines. Right. Right. They're doing desperate hell many marries of like risky treatments they don't know what to do because they're just from trying to save people's lives and hoping something anything will work and abermakum does have some anti-vow property and small doses from what I understand but the last thing I saw the amount it would take to cure COVID is about 150 times the dose it would kill a human so this stuff is fucking

useless for COVID um anyway so they just they someone read something about ivermectomy used in Brazil and they're like well this is the miracle cure obviously it's better than the vaccine so that's So that's how this stuff got started. But let's get through some other quick lunacy before we bring John on. Yeah. So no one goes to school board meetings, right? You've got to kind of be a little bit crazy to go to a school board meeting unless something really big is happening. So there's a phenomenon happening around because while no one's paying attention.

NPR has a story this week. As school board meetings get hostile, some members are calling it quits. Yeah, school board members from all over the country, they have roundups from like a bunch of states where people written resignation letters about how hostile and hardest to get them to do their job because it's just people yelling at them about COVID masks. And schooling from home is all that stuff isn't. I mean, I wouldn't want to homeschool my kid. I don't have a kid. You're more experienced than I am with it, Trey. I just don't like Kate. At one point, Katie brought up, she was like, she brought up homeschooling them or whatever because, but I was like, Katie, we, we don't know how to

do that. You know, I was like, teachers are important and, real i was like we're not we don't know how to be teachers we can't just do that you know so i mean and also yeah kids benefit from being in school so yeah you want to send them you know you're you're a dad you teach them how to ride a bike and build a potato gone then your job's none with the teacher right right uh if you're wondering why school boards are quitting here's a few clips from a school board meeting in lee county florida from just this week uh let's start yeah same meeting right These clips are from the same school board meeting in Florida. Again, what is up with this Florida propaganda?

Anyway, go ahead, Matt. Let's just... How you doing? My name is Brian Biggs. Biggs, B-I-GGS, not Briggs. I want to talk about the real pandemic. Child sex trafficking. By putting masks on these kids' face, you can't identify any of them.

So by the nine of you already voting on this tells me you guys support sex trafficking. trafficking. Hey, sir, you're out of order. Good. Good. People looked up like it did something. Yeah. It's like, yeah, I mean, like, I'm sure, like, if I was a part of an international

child sex trafficking ball of billionaires, what I'd do is hanging up in school board meetings, listening to assholes like that. But, like, it wasn't, he wasn't even necessarily, like, at least he got his over with quick. Check out this lady who says she's a nurse. I don't know if she could have made the nursing school because she seems quite impoverable. I hit it, ma'am.

my name is melissa i have two daughters in the school system these are demonic entities and we need to stick together remember we have authority in christ jesus these are demonic entities and all the school boards of all the united states of america and all of us christians will be sticking together to take them all out all the police officers that kick us out for our first amendment right will also be going down with them Do you understand? I'm a nurse, infectious disease, 13 years. Mass don't work.

These doctors that sit up here that were sneering at us and looking at us like we're scumbags, they need to go back to fucking medical school. Pam, you're out of order. This is your last warning. Communications. The needs to remember,

natural immunity is best you are all demonic entities you are going to be taken down the lord already had your first morning and this is your last she cannot speak so by the way natural natural immunity being best let's get rid of all vaccines by the way it took 400 years to get natural herd immunity to the bubonic plagues let's just do that um yeah and well what you know what would jesus do he would fucking he would rail against these fucking scumbagg doctors out here and take them all out one by one. That's what Jesus would do.

Any good Christian knows it. Jesus' main thing before coming back from the grave was healing lepers. That's why people thought he was cool, right? Right. He was a doctor. Magic pattern, better than doctor, actually. But anyway, so my favorite clip from this is a guy, just, I don't know, just play this clip.

This is a guy on the live feed complaining about how they're silencing him because there's no live feed. Was the live feed that's typically done for these events is down. Did you know that? No one can seem to find it. Why would that be? Oh, by accident, of course, we know.

So why would a bunch of fucking idiots who support me not be able to find this thing on their computer? Literally saying on live feed. Also, he kind of like looks right at the live feed camera at one point. He like looks directly into the live feed camera and he's like, No one can find the live feed. What's that about? Again, it's just so on the nose, man.

It's unreal. It's just like the council meeting some Parks and React if ever watch that show. Yes. So these are useful idiots and a lunatic friendship, but there is like an astro-turth, right-wing effort to get a bunch of people to run for school board. You know, I get critical race theory and stuff we've talked about. So I would advise everyone to please consider running for school board. and subjecting yourself to these morons because if not they're going to run and they're going to cheer each other on and your kids are going to be learning how everyone's a lizard

or at least keep up with who is running for school board and be aware of it and vote and stay involved and whatnot because yeah it's a pretty thankless job but now it's become a straight up political battleground and you see the people that are on the front lines of it so it could be a whole thing it also sucks it also sucks for still the regular old reasons which you wanted to do a little pallet cleanser here. This is also from this week, a video that went viral from a school war meeting. Nothing to do with Q&I. Yeah.

This is just what school board members normally have to deal with before the lunatic showed up. But let's play this, then we'll get John out here. Phil McCracken. Phil McCracken? Sulk. Suk Mahidik. Ophili McHawk. Ophelia McHawk.

Eileen Dover. Eileen Doler. Don Kidig. Don Kidig. Don Kidik. Don Kidik. Wayne Kerr. Wayne Kerr. So he absolutely should have known what was happening. We got to Aileen Dover.

Because our generation, the generation that dude was like this was the like a whole generation has discovered IP freely and we all forgot about it yeah now dude god bless the teenage bag of shit who did that you know that was supposed to be a three hour question and comment period only one real person was signed up the whole other three hours were just made up shit like dude so there was a real estate agent in oakridge tnc where i used to live named Dick Bales, B-A-L-E-S, and the teenagers in town would paint over the parts of the E on his real estate signs. It was like, for information, called Dick Balls, right?

And I was, I was fucking 30-year-old man living there or whatever, and I cried laughing every time I saw one of those. Again, just to know that there's still teenage bags of shit out there doing teenage bag of shit stuff like that, like changing his name to Dick Balls, you know. I just appreciate it. The kids are all right, man. The kids are all right. They're going to be okay, this generation.

All right. So let's get him out here. Our guest tonight grew up on a farm in the Ohio Valley, which is the steel mill and fracking part of Appalachia. He farmed produce and ran a stump grinding business for seven years. Then was the rural outreach coordinator for the Elizabeth Warren campaign and has just moved back to the Ohio Valley to start the Holler. The Holler's most recent video on the wealth gap has more than 9 million views across all

social media and has earned two national media stories this week everybody please welcome to the show john russell what's up john howdy boys how are we doing doing good man good to see you so i want to meet you i saw your video a couple days ago before i knew uh you were friends of matt and it was awesome man i dug it congratulations so on that note because i don't want to subject you to just sit in here watching yourself because i know i don't like that so instead i'm going to request people that haven't seen the video, can you just sort of walk us through what you cover in said video? Because it is illuminating and people do need to see it. Yeah, and I got to say, I'm just glad to have gone viral in the same week that teenagers are pranking the school boards.

But the video was about something that hit a nerve with people and it's understandable. It just, all I did was, and I actually have the graph here, but I graphed out with graph paper like it's the 1970s, the relative wealth. gap. And all the video does is make the point that a couple of hundred people have all of our money. And when we talk about the 1% and the 99%, it's kind of easy to get mixed up and not really realize how much money we're talking about here. But when you put it into relative scale, it becomes clear that all of us are in the same boat, the working class people with three car garages and pelotons, we have way more in common with each other than with the people who have the true wealth and we ought to get together, stop fighting with each other and do something about it.

Right, because you say it in the video, and I think this is true, a lot of times when people start talking about taxing the rich, a lot of people, as you put it, who have a peloton in a three-car garage, they hear that and they think, you're going to tax me more? Why are you taxing me more? but really that's not what we're talking about right we're talking about the uber wealth the so wealthy it's literally almost impossible for our brains to wrap themselves around how wealthy these people are we're talking about taxing them more let's talk let's talk about that relative gap i love this quote that's out there just to keep everything straight we're talking about big numbers if seconds were dollars, a million seconds would be 12 days. A billion seconds would be 32 years. We have one person

with $190 billion. And if he continues on this path, if we continue to choose that system that made him that rich, we'll have trillionaires. And a trillion seconds is 32,000 years. That's a scale of wealth we're talking here. And let me close on this. We only have 600 billionaires. And those people are commanding $4.2 trillion of wealth. It's a big deal. My takeaway is always like, there are reasons to take away a ton of Jeff Bezos's money, even if we just lit it on fire. He's too powerful.

Like we did the American Revolution, so we wouldn't have any king. So we'd all have kind of an equal say over our, you know, political future in reality. And you have one guy who literally, Jeff Bezos literally has his own foreign policy. His rivals are not other Walmart or other businesses. His rivals Muhammad bin Salman, right? It's like, like, he's literally in a foreign court. Like, him and bin Salomon had a falling out when the Salman killed Khashoggi and whatever and pulled Bezos.

Like, they're like public enemies number one. Like when Bezos' dickpicks got hacked and his marriage got ruined, that was tracked back to bad actors hired by Saudi intelligence, right? So, like, this is fuckery going on an international scale just because Jeff Bezos is a king. is a king of his own empire, essentially. And all these people can operate this way. And there's a reason for the survival democracy to take away a lot of their money,

even if we didn't use it to fund schools and roads. But by the way, schools and roads could use the funding, right? Big time. So that's what my, what I'm bringing comes back to about this, is like just how, you talk about the law of large numbers

and how human brains aren't built to conceive of large numbers because it's not something we ever had to do when we threw out all of human history. There just weren't big numbers, right? So it's like it's kick this in the dick with COVID. And also it's like made it made wealth inconceivable to most people. I think your video resonated because it moves here's a chart that shows that Kanye is worth closer to zero than he is Jeff Bezos.

That's one of my favorite statistics. You know, all of these famous other famous billionaires you can think of, Michael Bloomberg, Warren Buffett, depending on the day and how the Stark market is doing, a lot of them are closer to having zero dollars than to having Jeff Bezos levels of wealth. And Mark, you made a great point. This has been true forever. You know, read it in any history of democracies. Concentrated wealth and democracy.

Do not go together. Because when you get that level of concentration, people start to want to capture government and make the rules for themselves. Sounds familiar. They want to capture media and tell the story about themselves that puts their concentrated wealth in the best light. We have billionaires that are buying up the means of information. We've got billionaires, you know, hiring armies of lobbyists to run the halls of Congress like they own the place when it's when it's actually ours.

So those levels of wealth are not actually good for democracy, but I want to make another point here, too, because it can seem like we're all ganging up on Jeff Bezos, right? And, you know, a lot of people use Amazon. I do. And a lot of people like that service. But I think it's really worth it to make the point that nobody earns one billion dollars. Right. We have a system that funnels the value that's created by working class people. Working class people punch into work and they just make billionaires, they make money for freak nerds all day long.

All of the value created by you going to work and do whatever you do because of the system that has been set up by billionaires because they've captioned our government. It siphons that value you're creating and it puts it into the hands of people who didn't really earn that value. If Jeff Bezos sleeps all day, he's still going to get richer and richer and richer because this system, and this is what I wanted to make, Jeff Bezos is not inherently a bad person. He's the winner of a bad system. That funnels all the value that we create to a handful of people, 600 to be specific. Yeah. Well, it also, like, another thing about that that's always annoyed me is like you have the people, you know, on the right politically who hate welfare in all forms, you know, get up off your lazy. ass and work for it, you know, why should I pay for, you know, for you to live a life of luxury

or whatever? But then you have Bezos and the Walton family and whatnot who so many of their employees, they don't pay them enough to actually live. So they end up getting benefits that are paid for by the rest of us. So in effect, Bezos and the Waltons are on food stamps or they're on welfare, effectively, corporate welfare, you know, and people. On the front end and the back can because Jeff Bezos is a government contractor. A lot of his money comes from the government just giving him money. They like, not only just like the Amazon Web Services hosts, you know,

the CIA and the State Department and all that shit, every government agency's like servers. But Jeff Bezos, like Amazon relies on the post office to do a lot of last mile caring for him because he doesn't have the infrastructure to do it. They do it out on cheap. So like he's getting a coming and going. Yeah. Right. And they, and no one cares about that. Like corporate welfare

it doesn't matter to people. They worry about the, you know, mythical welfare queens or whatever instead for some reason and i just i don't know what you think about that john why you think that is or i i think there's a good reason behind it look um what would happen if the only thing that people could think about was how all of their labor gets funneled up through a system that was designed and paid for by billionaires who are taking all of the the money that people are really working for people be mad uh wealth concentration is uh at a more intense distribution now that it was in the French Revolution. And the last time that happened, there was violence, right? So people get angry about that. So to keep people from thinking

about just how badly we're getting worked over, they have to invent media networks that give us stuff to fight about, about how people are living, the guy next to you, which maybe works at the same place that you do is getting something for free paid for by your tax dollars. You know, they want, this is classic divide and conquer, and it is absolutely necessary to divide ordinary working class people when you have wealth concentration like this, because if we weren't divided, we might get together and do something crazy like a wealth tax, all right? And that's something I would love to talk about because their end lies a solution to, you unite folks in put a lot of this money to work for us after all it is our money well i mean

go ahead let's talk about it may i have the floor yes yeah yeah okay okay so here's what i like to start off with you know when you when say wealth tax people respect uh business folks and they should they should respect small business folks but really everything we're we're talking about here. It's beneficial to workers. It's beneficial in small business. We want more of those things. But let's talk about a wealth tax. You're probably already paying one. I work for the Warren campaign as one of her policies, a point she'd always make. If you own a home, you are paying a wealth tax because the property tax on the value of your home is a tax on your net worth. We can apply the same concept to all of the assets of billionaires.

and a tiny wealth tax that wouldn't make a dent. In fact, it wouldn't even stop the runaway growth of billionaires could raise trillions of dollars for us over a 10-year period. And let me just end this with a couple of specifics. There's plenty of plans out there. This was the Warren plan. But if you take a 2% tax on everything over $50 million, so you pay no tax.

up until $50 million. Everything past that, two pennies comes out of the dollar. And if you're past a billion, six pennies comes out of it. Do you know how many people would pay that tax? It's $75,000. A little more than that, 75,000 households, which is a small city. But the point is, this is hitting a tiny amount of people. And just that would raise nearly $4 trillion over 10 years.

That would end the conversation of how we pay for it. That's another thing, right, is that people think they hear like raising taxes on the, they don't realize that you pay the same amount on everything up till the, you know, the higher tax bracket. So like you pay the same amount on everything up to $2 million or whatever. And then over $2 million, then it's a higher tax break. But people think that if they make a certain amount of money and you raise taxes, they're going to have to pay more taxes on all. of that when that's not really how it works. There's just so much misinformation or

misunderstanding about how all of this shit works amongst regular people, you know? I never really knew many rich people until the last few years, but then like you know, working Hollywood and your friends started having successful careers and you learn a few things about money, right? For example,

the way working class people think about money, we do historically, is like money is a tangible thing. you get an exchange for tangible things. You trade chunks of your life in terms of time away from your kids or your family or literally if you work a blue-collar job where your back hurts or you lose a piece of your body in a machine, you're literally training pieces of your body to get money that you exchange for goods and services, right? But if you were to tell a rich person that their income was connected to how hard they work in any way,

they'd laugh on your fucking face. There's no connection there. It's manufactured value created on paper. But we think money equals hard work. so we don't want to take away the dividends of people's part work but jeff bezos did not work a hundred ninety thousand million times harder than the janitor at amazon warehouse it just doesn't work that way and sir go ahead no go ahead sorry about that oh i was gonna say listen in the microcosm of my life i can tell you that like because i've been up and down the income ladder a few times

because i'm an idiot in a weird career field but like all the like all my easiest jobs were the highest paying like the only blue collar job I ever got to take a nap at was working construction we're waiting a load of stone I'd curl up in a pile of dirt under a tree right but but in an office job there's a couch you can go fucking take a nap you know it's it's so weird well it's also just the whole thing of like the there you know it's been pointed out many times before but it's like it costs money to not have any money and you make money by having money like if you just have money, you make more money. If you don't have money, that's expensive. It costs money. Late fees, all that shit versus interest rates and whatever. So it's like, it's very much

an exponential scale, you know, as you go up, like, it doesn't get harder. It does absolutely does not get, you don't have to work harder to make like that much more money, you know. You have to work hard to survive at a certain level. But once you break through and start making enough money, it's not proportional to how hard you work, how much more money you make. Yeah. One of the first videos we did that got any traction was about this unearned wealth is what I call it, because that's what it is. It's wealth without work. And it starts at an astoundingly low level. I mean, I was a blue-collar person for a good number of years running a stump grinder, right? You know, I would come home looking like a coal miner.

One of the most shocking things is when I sold the stump grinder and got the money from that, I just stuck it in an index fund and then magically it started appreciating in value with me grinding not a single stump. But to really put a fine point on this, the S&P 500, the collection of the 500 largest stocks, if you put, let's say a million dollars into that index fund, over the long run through Great Depression's and World Wars and COVID, the market goes up on average about 10% a year. In other words, on a million dollars, which sounds like a lot, but again, on that relative scale is not very much compared to the rich. That's $100,000 every year for no work. And then it compounds on itself. So you scale that up to $190 billion. And pretty soon you see that this system is just a black hole of money compounding upon itself with nobody doing anything about it.

But what we could do is tax it and put it into public assets so we can actually have nice, shit, and the last thing I want to close on with this, all that stuff we just talked about, the super rich, and your audience are, we're smart people here, we probably know this, but it's worth saying, the super rich pay the lowest share of their wealth in taxes, in fact, in 2019, the top 1% of the 1% paid about 3.5% of their net worth in taxes. And for the bottom 99%, the same number was over 7%. So the super rich are paying less than half of what you're paying in taxes, federal, state and local, as a share of your wealth.

And if they just paid the same, we would have a completely different government and not have to worry about this pay for a question at all, and we could invest it in people. I don't know, man. It sounds like if we institute your policy, and then Jeff Bezos is going to be eating soup and asking me to help him move. I don't know. I'd be living in that quality soup, maybe from Whole Foods.

I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Hey, John, if you worked that hard to get to the point he's at, would you want people taking money out of your pocket? Is that what you would want? It's not fair. When we all work to get to that place one day, we don't want people taking money out of our pockets.

God damn it, because we'll all be Jeff Bezos one day. If I get there, you know, on the insanely low, I might just buy up all the newspapers and invent a story about myself and maybe capture the government and protect all that wealth I didn't earn. I'm definitely going to the moon. I'll tell you that much. Dick shape rocket, I might want to avoid that. Dick Shaped Rocket, for sure. The biggest Dick Shaped Rocket you've ever seen in your life.

All right. John, thank you. Hey, listen, so before we go, I want to give you an opportunity, let people know how they can follow your stuff and keep track with everything you're doing and whatnot. Well, hey, thanks. We're a big fan of you guys. I'm so glad to be on. I see these audience comments, and you guys are the best. If you want to follow me, head over to at Hey, John Russell, H-E-Y-J-O-H-N-R-U-S-E-L-L-E-L-L-E-L-R across all social media.

That's where you get the TikToks. And if you want to support progressive media from Appalachia, head over to The Holler, T-H-E-H-O-L-L-E-R. Subscribe and support these videos. Thank you. Right on. Well, thank you, John. appreciate it. It was a great time. We'll have you back for long. Be good, brother. All right. Thanks, boys. Take it easy. All right. See you. All right. John Russell, everybody. So, let's get into

questions and comments here. One thing I was going to say, and I'm going to be scrolling through his comments over here. I think we may have talked about this before, but, like, that whole, like, just because you have all this money doesn't mean you worked this much harder to get it thing. I feel like there's a it's just something in human nature with like so my wife before I knocked her up she was a personal trainer and did fitness competitions and stuff like that and like there's a real reticence towards admitting any kind of like genetic advantages when it comes that like we've all known somebody we all have a buddy who can like eat like a horse and drink a case of beer every day or whatever and not gain any weight or whatnot like everybody knows that guy right

And like, but, you can't bring that type of shit up to a lot of, like, fitness professionals or whatever because it's, they, it all needs to be tied to, your results are tied to how hard you work. Do you know what I mean? And I feel like it's the same mentality that Americans have about, about wealth, you know? Like, yeah, you can't just, you cannot just sit on your ass and get rich if you're not rich to start with. and you can't just sit on your ass and get in shape either. But it's not a one-to-one comparison of the amount of work you put in to the results you will get, depending on your age, the genetics you have, depending on your socioeconomic status, what you're working with to begin with.

It's not like a perfect formula, and a lot of people treat it like it is in their heads, I think, because people want to believe that working hard equals massive amounts of success or whatever, you know? yeah but we're not here to discourage hard work right working hard is good of course it's good the uh there's a um a writer i like a lot michael lewis he wrote the books that turned into the the movie's the blind side and a big short and a few other ones and whatever but he writes about about financial policy but um his first book was called liars he had a job on wall street and quit because he realized it was such bullshit it had it had to be collapsing and it lasted a little bit longer but his first book was called liar's poker anyway he gave the he gave the conventionment

Commensive speak at Yale a couple years ago, and it was about luck. And he was just trying to explain to these kids that they're very lucky. He's like, you were very lucky to be here at Yale, to be graduating, to be gifted with the intellect and the work ethic to have been successful and to be graduating from here. And you're going to enter the world of other lucky people. Now you're going to spend the rest of your life thinking about what that means, whether you did it all through hard work or yada yada, but his point was just like all the all lucky people owe is to recognize that they're lucky.

Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah. To be like, to not look down on other people who aren't as lucky and to think about your place in society because of that. And that's, yeah. And I think with like a lot of people with like a lot of wealthy people or whatnot, they take it personally when you imply that there was a lot of luck involved. You know, they're like, no, I've worked. And a lot of them have worked hard. A lot of them have not.

But I'm saying they take it personally. And the implication is that other people aren't working as hard as you are. That's why they don't have as much as you have, which is bullshit, and that's what pisses people off about it, I think. But the people who invented Betamax were just as far as the people who invented VCRs. In fact, they made a better product, but porn chose VCRs. Just didn't work out, right. Yeah, exactly. So they lost a race through no fault of their own.

And they couldn't have worked any harder or maybe better, but I'm sorry. It just didn't work out. And sometimes it just don't work out. Yeah, exactly. The point I was arriving at was that he's basically saying, like, recognize you're lucky and hard work. You can change your life on the margins, but the general course of it's going to be shaped by shit you cannot control. And so you should work hard to improve your odds while recognizing that you don't have much control over the ultimate outcome with how things go. So work hard, but also know that things are going to happen.

You can't control. Yeah. Brian Fowler from YouTube, I mentioned my wife was a personal trainer when we met. He said, did she meet you while grabbing a snack tray? a snack tray That's funny I am a living snack tray We work together at

Crawl Daddy's Bar and Grill in Cookville, Tennessee That's right And when I first showed up She thought Who's this frat boy doucheback Because I had a chin strap beard Chin strap played though

Just everybody knows Chin strap played Hey it was like 2008 Chinstrap played Oh God I was going to say 1996 it would have made sense No it made

Hey chin strap played God damn it You weren't there All right anyway But no, I think I was just so much different from all the people who took care of themselves that she mostly hung out with, that she was intrigued by it, I guess. Jillian Ratliff says, hard work by itself and luck by itself isn't enough. How is it how is it this hard to grasp this concept? And yeah, I agree.

It's like it takes both. Like, it absolutely takes both. You can be real lucky if you don't, like, work hard to capitalize on the luck. It's not going to matter. You can also work your fucking ass off. And it may not matter. It just may not. That's just how life works, you know?

Like, to me, physical fitness is a useful lens to which will look at this stuff because you can be born in great shape. Right. But in reality, like, you're born with what you're born with, and you can do the best you can with that. That's really the world you're in. So you compare it to yourself and do the best you can every day. And then let go and let go and like, uh, you know. So it's how it's going to go.

Right. I could have given everything I had in my physical capabilities to be like a strong safety or something. I wouldn't never sniff it. I wasn't ever going D1. I wasn't going D2, let alone the, it didn't, it did not matter how hard I worked. It never mattered how hard I worked. It wasn't in the cards. And that's true in every field for everybody.

And like you, all you have to do is just acknowledge that that shit is true. you know and be real about it if I could be anything in life it would be an NBA small forward and it doesn't matter how how hard I work on my jump shot I'm 5'9

right never happening no yeah yeah yeah yeah all right let's see do you want to talk about that Wil Wil Wilkins and Peace we were texting about earlier

let's I think that's kind of evergreen let's save that next week April P says the part I can't take is that Bezos claimed the child tax credit for $300 because I'm sure he needs some new stocks. I'm sure he just has people that like do whatever they literally can do on his behalf. Like anything that he can get away with claiming, they claim it for him. But yeah, and that's why that's part of how they get to that point in the first place. It's by taking every possible avenue they can to keep as much money as they can.

I have account that does my taxes. I'll still have to sign it and I see what the taxable income is. he would have had to look at it and see this taxable income for that year was $40,000. He would have had to look at it and see that. Sweet Lou says the quote's American dream, end quote, con is the tool that drives the capitalism grift.

And I very much agree with it. It's that like people, that's a big part of the mentality a lot of people have. It's like, that's how it works in America. One day, I'll be Jeff Bezos or whatever. Like, you can't punish him now because we all want to that one day and we don't want to be punished when we get to that when that's not how any of this shit works was it the Alexis de Tocqueville quote that uh all americans behave like they're

temporarily embarrassed millionaires yeah yeah yeah yeah that's true one day one day when my ship comes in baby yeah and it's coming when out of this ship i'm gonna fuck everybody on that ship yeah i'm gonna fuck them all over fuck this ship everybody that rose this ship all the people shoveling coal and the bowels of this ship this is my ship now yeah fuck all the people to keep it from sinking okay last one here eric landery says chin strap played it did it did mark chin strap played okay listen uh thank you all for joining us and uh thank you john russell for being with us last one more time well read comedy dot com for tickets for the live show patreon dot com slash tray crowder if you want to do the patreon thing i appreciate you either way

Thank you all very much for being here. I'm Trey, and that's Mark. And we'll be back next week with more skews. See, love you, bye.